The places where I most often vacation tend to require seasonal help above and beyond what can be found locally. As a result, they hire people, mostly young people such as students on summer break, from wherever they can get them. I love this. As soon as I hear an accent, I like to try to guess where the speaker is from. In that way, I’ve met and learned about people from all over the world. In past years I’ve encountered people from Ukraine, Jamaica, Bulgaria, Serbia, Haiti, Brazil, and many other places where I’ll never travel. What a privilege! It enriches my life when I ask these fascinating folks about their backgrounds and lives.

This used to be a Good Thing. No more.

I’m at a restaurant and someone on the wait staff speaks with what I guess to be an accent from Eastern Europe so I ask where they’re from. In years gone by, they would have gladly answered with a smile, happy that someone was interested in them as more than just service people.

Today, I too often get an ICE-y stare, pun intended. They immediately question my motives for asking. They have to; the stakes are too high. These people live in fear that they are not only not welcome here but their very freedom is in jeopardy. Note that this has nothing to do with whether they are here legally or not. Anyone can be (and too often has been) yanked off to some kind of detention center for no reason other than looking or sounding different.

Everyone loses in this game.

This is not how it’s meant to be. Whatever happened to “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”? No one breathes free in a polICE state.